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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Love a book where people just walk and talk!
Beautiful prose with abnormal mother daughter relationship. I really like the pacing of the book, it's very quiet and original. Reading this made me feel like I'm taking a walk through a quite suburban territory with misty rain.
emotional
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I wanted to like this book. The writing was beautiful and it felt like walking around on a rainy afternoon. The nuance between characters. But I was simply bored the entire time. By the end I wasn’t sure if the mom was actually there or not and maybe that was up for interpretation.
This is a gem of a book. Reflective without navel-gazing. Descriptive without being flowery. Loved the setting of a holiday as well. Recommend reading in two sittings, next to a fire.
Elegantly written, beautiful use of language, and interesting reflections on, well, reflection. Entirely lacking in narrative dynamic.
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This is such an important book. It expresses so precisely the subtleties of a quiet, unexpressed love and tired anger between an adult daughter and her ageing mother, as they take a trip through Japan. The author gives us a very lived-in view of the daughter's internalised experience of both taking care of her mom's needs and abilities during the trip, her understanding of her family history, but also the multi-layered resignation she goes back and forth to, with regard to her mom's apparent inability or reluctance to understand or engage verbally with emotional complexity, empathy, or vulnerability. A soft and bittersweet book.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
emotional
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I've never been to Japan but the way she described Japan in monsoon made me feel like I was standing beside the narrator feeling the sun streaking my face through the leaves, my hands catching tiny droplets of rain after the drizzle from a thick canopy of lush green trees. It was so vivid that I feel like she took me there to the museums, shrines, mountains, noodles shop, train stations, to Hong Kong and to northern Australia.
So this book follows an unnamed narrator who takes her mother for a trip to Japan. As we follow them along the trip, we get to see not only them experiencing this trip but also her slipping back to her past events whenever she encounters something in the trip that reminds her of it. we get to see how she was in her university, her experience with her first boyfriend, her sister's experience being to their mom' s hometown for the first time bringing her a strange feeling and not being able to understand her mother tongue, her comparing everything she goes through with how her mother would have experienced it differently, her curiosity of her now significant other's father's sculpture and art and many more. it's so mundane but at the same time, makes you pause and be thoughtful.
There wasn't any filter between the reader, the narrator and the author that her writing evoke a kind of longing and left me with the appreciation of how much beauty is in this world, in our relationships, past fleeting memories, art, thoughts and generally life
The switching of the timelines between past and present was so smooth and uninterrupting the flow of the story, it felt like watching a day in the life of an introvert's introspective life.
It was a very short read and I started this book slowly, sitting with the story patiently but as the story progressed, I just wanted to rush to the end because it kind feel flat and I was bit bored not because the story lacked in any way but I just wasn't in the right mood for it. So if it wasn't for that, i would have given it 5/5⭐ but I'm sticking to 4.5/5⭐
If you are a fan of Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, you'll definitely enjoy this book.
So this book follows an unnamed narrator who takes her mother for a trip to Japan. As we follow them along the trip, we get to see not only them experiencing this trip but also her slipping back to her past events whenever she encounters something in the trip that reminds her of it. we get to see how she was in her university, her experience with her first boyfriend, her sister's experience being to their mom' s hometown for the first time bringing her a strange feeling and not being able to understand her mother tongue, her comparing everything she goes through with how her mother would have experienced it differently, her curiosity of her now significant other's father's sculpture and art and many more. it's so mundane but at the same time, makes you pause and be thoughtful.
There wasn't any filter between the reader, the narrator and the author that her writing evoke a kind of longing and left me with the appreciation of how much beauty is in this world, in our relationships, past fleeting memories, art, thoughts and generally life
The switching of the timelines between past and present was so smooth and uninterrupting the flow of the story, it felt like watching a day in the life of an introvert's introspective life.
It was a very short read and I started this book slowly, sitting with the story patiently but as the story progressed, I just wanted to rush to the end because it kind feel flat and I was bit bored not because the story lacked in any way but I just wasn't in the right mood for it. So if it wasn't for that, i would have given it 5/5⭐ but I'm sticking to 4.5/5⭐
If you are a fan of Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, you'll definitely enjoy this book.
reflective
slow-paced
Au excels at drawing her reader into the scene. Among the memorable sections was the chapter about reading ancient Greeks for the first time and the idyll of house-sitting in the professor's book-filled house with the well equipped kitchen. Even though the narrator was about to leave that behind, seeing the house as a kind of museum. I love the ambivalence about the ancient Greeks, "By the time I returned to them, much later I was almost disappointed to find I was enthralled by them still." (14).
I was uneasy for the narrator's mother throughout all those descriptions of long walks on foot and multiple train changes. It might be, though, that is one way of suggesting that her mother is an imaginary companion on this journey.
I was uneasy for the narrator's mother throughout all those descriptions of long walks on foot and multiple train changes. It might be, though, that is one way of suggesting that her mother is an imaginary companion on this journey.